[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Ensuring samples are representative
On Mon, 2016-10-17 at 21:34 +0000, yamahito wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have an upcoming contract that will involve converting between XML > formats. My client wants their customer to provide a representative > sample In that case make sure your contract does not promise any level of accuracy other than a best effort. > The onus may be firmly on the end customer, In which case get that in writing. > What would people recommend to help a) ensure that the sample *is* > representative and b) help target/prioritise the work on the > transformation? You can't ensure it. It may help to get the five longest, five involving mathematics, five involving tables, five involving both, the five oldest documents, and then every 17th document (or some other prime number) by document number. I say 17th because otherwise you might just get e.g. the first of every batch, and discover that's always a cover letter. But it depends what people are willing to send you. If they won't do that, ask for some "complete sets, if documents come in groups". Ask the people working with the documents which ones are easy and which are hard and why. But don't assume that what they find hard will be hard for you - e.g. "the long tables are hard because they have 10,000 rows" doesn't bother a program, but "the single-page cover sheets are all different because they came from a word processor" is another matter. Converting e.g. from word processing or page layout XML files to a higher level is difficult - e.g. you may need to group list items together into a list, coping with continuing numbering after an intervening table... It's like a giant puzzle and can be a lot of fun to work out. The two most important things I learned from doing SGML and XML conversions are to automate as much as possible and to document your processes. Next most important comes using programming tools such as make, Perl, XSLT, a revision control system, with never any need to remember which scripts to run and in what order. ] Hope this helps, Liam
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